1 Anscombe and Geach on Mind and Soul John Haldane Abstract Anscombe and Geach were among the most interesting philosophers to have come out of Oxford in the twentieth century. Even before they encountered Wittgenstein they had begun to distinguish themselves from their contemporaries, and in the course of their work they moved between highly abstract and often technical issues and themes familiar to non-academics, the latter aptly illustrated by the title of Geach’s first collection of essays God and the Soul, and by that of Anscombe’s analysis of human sexual acts “Contraception and Chastity”. 1 I consider their early work together and illustrate its influence on later writings by each. I then examine the ideas and arguments advanced in those writings in so far as they bear upon the issue of materialism, and the question of the existence and nature of the soul. Finally, I respond to their somewhat skeptical arguments, though conclude that there is also reason to acknowledge the propriety of what I will term ‘spiritual agnosticism’. ________________________________ I 1 Peter Geach, God and the Soul (London: Routledge Kegan & Paul, 1969); Elizabeth Anscombe “Contraception and Chastity” in Mary Geach & Luke Gormally eds, Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics by G.E.M. Anscombe (Exeter: ImprintAcademic, 2008): 170-91.
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Anscombe and Geach on Mind and Soul
John Haldane
Abstract
Anscombe and Geach were among the most interesting philosophers to have come out of Oxford
in the twentieth century. Even before they encountered Wittgenstein they had begun to
distinguish themselves from their contemporaries, and in the course of their work they moved
between highly abstract and often technical issues and themes familiar to non-academics, the
latter aptly illustrated by the title of Geach’s first collection of essays God and the Soul, and by
that of Anscombe’s analysis of human sexual acts “Contraception and Chastity”. 1 I consider
their early work together and illustrate its influence on later writings by each. I then examine the
ideas and arguments advanced in those writings in so far as they bear upon the issue of
materialism, and the question of the existence and nature of the soul. Finally, I respond to their
somewhat skeptical arguments, though conclude that there is also reason to acknowledge the
propriety of what I will term ‘spiritual agnosticism’.
________________________________
I
1 Peter Geach, God and the Soul (London: Routledge Kegan & Paul, 1969); Elizabeth Anscombe
“Contraception and Chastity” in Mary Geach & Luke Gormally eds, Faith in a Hard Ground:
Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics by G.E.M. Anscombe (Exeter: ImprintAcademic,
2008): 170-91.
2
Reflecting on his intellectual life and his relationship as a philosopher with Elizabeth
Anscombe. Peter Geach observed:
“Although we have both followed a philosophical career, and have sometimes
formally collaborated and often critically read one another’s works, we think
about different though overlapping topics, and in a noticeably different style; and
either of us, when questioned about the thought of the other, will often not know
the right answer. I am surprised that people find this surprising” 2
Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001) and Peter Geach (1916-2013) met in Oxford in 1938
and married three years later on Boxing Day 1941 at Brompton Oratory in London. They retired
from full time professorial positions in the 1980s: he from Leeds in 1981, she from Cambridge in
1986. Thereafter they continued to read papers and to publish for a decade or more. We may say,
therefore, that they shared lives as productive philosophers for over half a century; they also
occasionally referred explicitly to one another in print mostly citing particular items. In part this
essay addresses three biographical-cum-interpretative questions: to what extent did they work
together? what themes emerge from any significant collaboration? and is their mutual influence
evident in their individual writings? I am also concerned, however, with two philosophical
issues: first, what is the nature of their resistance to the idea of a surviving subsistent immaterial
soul? and second, how might one respond to the objections they raise?
II
2 Peter Geach “Intellectual Autobiography” in Harry A. Lewis ed. Peter Geach: Philosophical
Encounters, (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991): 10.
3
So far as “working together” might mean contributing to a joint project, which is what, I think,
Geach had in mind in speaking of having “formally collaborated”, the answer to the question “to
what extent did they work together?” is very little. It is worth mentioning at the outset, however,
that in the four to six year period between them meeting in Oxford and marrying, and Anscombe
later beginning to attend Wittgenstein’s classes as a post-graduate in Cambridge first in 1941/2
and then when he resumed lecturing in 1944, Geach acted as something of a philosophy ‘tutor’ to
her. In his “Philosophical Autobiography”, quoted from above, he writes:
Elizabeth had a lot of philosophical teaching from me. I could see that she was
good at the subject, but her real development was to come only under the
powerful stimulus of Wittgenstein’s lectures and her personal conversations with
him. Naturally she then moved away from my tutelage; I am afraid that I
resented that, but I could recognize this feeling as base and irrational, and soon
overcame it.3
Geach had graduated from Balliol with a First in literae humaniores in 1938 and been
awarded a Gladstone Research Studentship (at Gladstone’s Library at Hawarden in North Wales)
for which he chose the topic of John McTaggart’s idealist metaphysics. The subject was one
about which he was already quite knowledgeable having been directed to read McTaggart’s
Some Dogmas of Religion at about the age of twelve by his father George Geach who had been a
student with C.D. Broad and Wittgenstein at Trinity College Cambridge, studying there with
G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, John Neville Keynes and McTaggart himself.
Geach Senior had come back to England having been a professor of philosophy in the
Indian Educational Service, but then being unable to secure a professorship in England he
3 Ibid. 11.
4
devoted himself to teaching his son from Keynes’s Formal Logic, proceeding to Principia
Mathematica, and while the younger Geach was still at school set the foundation for him to make
a serious study of McTaggart’s The Nature of Existence. Two points arising from this precocious
background are relevant to his influence on Anscombe and may bear upon their most nearly joint
academic project which I will describe in detail in a moment. First, when they met and took up
with one another, and during the period of her undergraduate studies also in Lit. Hum., Geach
was already well-read, publicly acknowledged to be exceptionally gifted, and desirous of sharing
the fruits of his studies. Second, his familiarity with and liking for McTaggart’s spiritualist
idealism, which maintained the reality of souls in loving communion with one another, made him
unresponsive to the Cartesian problems of egocentrism and other minds, and ripe for the idea,
which he and Anscombe would later get from Wittgenstein, that participation in shared forms of
life is necessary for human intellectual activity, and that on this account there is no question of
doubting that others think, or indeed in many cases what they think, given that language
manifests thought and that meaning is public.
Two books are attributed to Anscombe and Geach jointly. First, Descartes Philosophical
Writings 4 in which they translated and edited selected texts: the Meditations, most of the
Discourse on Method, parts of the Principles, extracts from Rules for the Direction of the Mind
and Notes on a Certain Program, and a few other items. Second, Three Philosophers 5 consisting
of three chapters on Aristotle, Aquinas and Frege, respectively.
4 G.E.M. Anscombe and P.T. Geach, Descartes Philosophical Writings (Edinburgh: Thomas
Nelson, 1954).
5 G.E.M. Anscombe and P.T. Geach, Three Philosophers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961).
5
These two works are different in composition. The first was a collaborative effort in
which they discussed translations, selections and a note to readers, though most of the work was
done by Geach.6 The volume carries an introduction by the historian and philosopher of modern
science Alexander Koyre which is celebratory of Descartes’ work but makes no reference to the
translation. Anscombe and Geach themselves present only a ‘Translators’ Note’ yet this is of
some significance for it explains a rendering decision that represents a particular interpretation of
Descartes’ account of the nature of mind, an interpretation that would feature prominently in
later writings by each 7 and which influenced others in thinking about Cartesian philosophy of
mind.8
6 See Anthony Kenny Peter Geach “Peter Thomas Geach (1916-2014)” Biographical Memoirs of
Fellows of the British Academy, XIV, (London: British Academy, 2015) 185–203; 191.
7 See Anscombe, “Events in the Mind” a paper dating from 1963 but first published in 1981 and
“The First Person” (1975) in which she attacks Descartes’ argument for dualism, both essays
appear in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind. The Collected Philosophical Papers of
G.E.M. Anscombe, vol. II (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981) 21-36 and 56-63. In a rare reference to the
Descartes volume Anscombe writes in footnote 1 of the latter essay that “Principles of
Philosophy, I, LX contains Descartes’ best statement [of his argument]” and then quotes the
passage from her and Geach’s edition of Descartes Philosophical Writings, Ibid 21. For Geach
see Mental Acts: Their Content and their objects (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957)
section 26.
8 As indicative see Anthony Kenny, Descartes, A Study of his Philosophy (New York: Random
House, 1968) and Saul Kripke, “The First Person” in Saul A. Kripke, Philosophical Troubles,
Collected Papers, Volume I (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) Ch. 10.
6
Up to that point, and until the publication in 1985 of the Cambridge University Press two
volume edition of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes translated by John Cottingham,
Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, the standard English rendering of Descartes’ texts was
the Elizabeth Haldane and G.R.T. Ross translation The Philosophical Works of Descartes (1911,
also published by Cambridge) which does not introduce interpretative emphases into the
translated text. Anscombe and Geach explain the significance of their translation decision as
follows:
“The most important problem of a Descartes translation is the rendering of the
verbs cogitare and penser and their derivatives. Since Locke, the traditional
English renderings have been the verb think and the noun thought. We have
decided to abandon this tradition, which seems to us to run the risk of seriously
misrepresenting what Descartes says. … Descartes himself defines the words as
applying not only to intellectual processes but also to acts of will, passions,
mental images, and even sensations. … The words think and thought will
sometimes do … We have, however, often found it advisable to use more general
terms, such as the noun and verb experience and the adjective conscious; we have
fairly consistently used conscious being as a rendering of res cogitans.” 9
The point is evidently connected with the fact that Aristotle, his medieval followers and
later scholastic-trained philosophers, including Descartes’ own Jesuit teachers at La Fleche,
distinguished between sensory experience and thought, attributing the former to the sense
powers, and the latter to an intellectual power which, together with the will, comprises the
rational mind. Descartes departs from this tradition by bundling of all psychological states into a
9 Op. cit. xlvii-xlviii.
7
single broad category ‘mind’ (mens) and in treating consciousness as being the criterion of
inclusion within this. Anscombe and Geach do not include the Second Set of Replies to the
Meditations where Descartes says as much but they do begin the selection from Principia
Philosophiae with section 9 where (in their translation) he writes:
“By the term conscious experience (cogitationis) I understand everything that
takes place within ourselves so that we are aware of it (nobis cosciis), in so far as
it is an object of our awareness (conscientia). And so not only acts of
understanding, will and imagination, but even sensations, are here taken as
experience (cogitare).” 10
It is worth emphasizing how innovative was Descartes’ use of cogitatio or pensée to
cover any kind of mental item. His contemporary readers initially supposed that he meant acts of
judgement, and so objected that in characterising human psychology in terms of these he was
seemingly omitting much else. One such was le Père Mersenne to whom Descartes replies
writing “You argue that if the nature of man is solely to think, then he has no will. I do not see
that this follows; for willing, understanding, imagining, and sensing and so on are just different
ways of thinking, and all belong to the soul.”11
There is a further, and arguably more important, feature of their translation that
Anscombe and Geach do not mention but which is also part of their interpretation of the
distinctiveness of Descartes position. It concerns the object of self-awareness as rendered
10 Ibid. 183.
11 “Letter to Mersenne End of May 1637” in John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald
Murdoch and Anthony Kenny trans. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Volume 3, The
Correspondence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 56.
8
through the first person reflexive pronoun “I”. In their translation of Meditation II which
contains Descartes famous argument that his conscious/thinking self (ego ipse cogitans) is
distinct from his body, they italicize I or put it into single inverted commas: ‘I’. The first
measure might be read simply as giving emphasis but both are intended to capture a kind of
usage that they are thereby attributing to Descartes. One might wonder whether this is a
question-begging intrusion, for in the original text when he writes of wanting to know what it is
of which he is conscious when he is aware that he exists, Descartes does not seem to mark out
ego in any distinctive way (writing “Novi me existere; quaero, quis sim ego, ille, quem novi”). In
fact, however, there is a peculiarity here, for he applies the demonstrative ‘that’ (ille) to the first
person pronoun (ego) thereby putting the latter into the category of a generic term just as much
would the use of a definite or indefinite article.
Since Anscombe and Geach provide no philosophical commentary, and do not advert to
the treatment of ‘I’ in the prefatory note, my attribution of an interpretative purpose might seem
conjectural. In fact, however, it became an important feature of their criticism of Descartes’
argument for mind/body dualism that they read him as introducing in the Meditations a special
use of ‘I’ in the reporting of thoughts and utterances, and as presenting an associated special
mode of reflection. This diagnosis is a feature of Anscombe’s famous essay “The First Person”
where she argues that Descartes’ proof of the non-identity of himself with the human being
involves a special indirect reflexive use of ‘myself’ which is parasitic upon an understanding of a
use of ‘I’ that is presupposed in Descartes’s self-addressed reflections.12
Anscombe holds that in the context of these reflections, which include doubts as to
whether subjective experience presents any material existent, this involves an illegitimate
12 “The First Person” op. cit..
9
transposition of an ordinary reflexive indicator into the category of a referring expression, which
because of seeming immunity to error through misidentification calls for a special kind of
referent distinct from Descartes the man. She writes
“[If the referent of ‘I’ is not this body] Nothing but a Cartesian Ego will
serve. … Thus we discover that if “I” is a referring expression then Descartes
was right about what the referent was …”
Then later she writes
“With that thought: ‘The I was subject, not object, and hence invisible’, we
have an example of language itself being as it were possessed of an
imagination, forcing its image upon us.
The dispute is self-perpetuating, endless, irresoluble, so long as we
adhere to the initial assumption, made so far by all the parties to it: that “I” is
a referring expression. … And this is the solution: “I” is neither a name nor
another kind of expression whose logical role is to make reference, at all.” 13
Anscombe’s conclusion about “I” not being a referring expression has been widely
rejected and even treated as evidently absurd,14 but it is important in evaluating it to take full
account of the Cartesian context which provides the setting, and to note that the use of “I” with
which she was concerned was one taken to be such that it could not fail of reference. Part of the
widespread dismissal of her case is also attributable, however, to her characteristically dense and
13 Ibid. 31-32.
14 One salient consideration is that any inference in which ‘I’ is treated referentially is valid, e.g.
“I have a headache” entails “someone has a headache”; “neither I nor anyone else was present”
entails “no-one was present” and so on.
10
non-linear style of argumentation. It is valuable, therefore, to compare her criticisms with the
briefer, clearer and more engagingly presented reasoning to a similar conclusion given by Peter
Geach in Mental Acts and again in “Reincarnation”.15 The first was published in 1957 (the same
year as Anscombe published Intention) and the second in 1969 in God and the Soul, but, as the
preface to the latter reports, Mental Acts borrowed material from an earlier version of
‘Reincarnation’, so we may suppose that the relevant part was written quite close to the period of
the Descartes’ translations. Here then is a passage from “Reincarnation” which anticipates the
publication of Anscombe’s “First Person” argumentation by twenty years:
“If I enunciate propositions containing the word ‘I’ to hearers or readers, they will
be given certain information, true or false, about the speaker or writer: they will
be truly informed if and only if the corresponding proposition is true that they
would enunciate using ‘Peter Geach’ where I use ‘I’ and making the requisite
grammatical changes. …
The only interpretation of ‘I’ for which [empirical – my term] first-person
propositions would not be straightforwardly [confirmable – my insertion] or
refutable is a certain solioquistic use of ‘I’. By way of illustrating this, consider a
Descartes brooding over his German stove and saying., ‘I’m getting into a
frightful puzzle – but what then is this “I” that is puzzled? …
… The use of ‘I’ here is essentially soliloquistic; the idea is that each man who
has mastered the use of ‘I’ could in solitude use these lines of argument to
convince himself.
15 See Mental Acts, section 26, especially 118-120; and ‘Reincarnation’ in God and the Soul, 1-
16, especially 6-9.
11
… But what is it that is indubitable? What are the soliloquistic utterances ‘I am in
horrible pain’ and ‘I am frightfully puzzled’ supposed to supply over and above
the soliloquistic utterances ‘This pain is horrible’ and ‘This is frightfully
puzzling’? …
… It appears to me that this use of ‘I’ in soliloquy is a degenerate use, and there is
no question of it referring to anything.” 16
What emerges from the Descartes translations and the writings that follow and implicitly
refer back to it 17 is a shared view of Descartes’ revolution: in effect introducing what proved to
be a compelling conception of the human person and of the primary tasks of philosophy, viz.
relating the conscious immaterial self, epistemologically and ontologically, to non-mental reality.
So far as evaluation of Descartes’ philosophy is concerned they might be described as holding
that he was a genuinely creative but misdirected thinker (an opinion they also shared regarding
David Hume). In particular, in their estimate, Descartes re-oriented philosophical thinking about
mind and knowledge by introducing a particular form of seemingly self-directed thought and by
extending the notion of thought itself from a restricted range of intellectual operations to
consciousness in general.
The second book bearing their names as authors – Three Philosophers - does not assign
chapters to writers individually and this might lead some to suppose they were co-authored. They
were not. Anscombe wrote the Aristotle chapter and Geach those on Aquinas and Frege. This is
16 Ibid. 6-7.
17 Geach in “Reincarnation” 8, writes: “was it, perhaps, by a Freudian self-betrayal that
Descartes wrote in his private notebook ‘lavartus prodeo’, ‘I come forward in a mask’?” here
recalling the opening paragraph of the first selection in Descartes Philosophical Writings, 3.
12
clear enough from the prose styles and preoccupations but it is testified to by the fact that the
Aristotle chapter evidently derives from Anscombe’s 1952 Joint Session paper “The Principle of
Individuation”,18 while the Aquinas one reproduces elements from Geach’s “Form and
Existence”,19 and the Frege one reiterates points made in several of his Philosophical Review
articles from the 1950s (later gathered in Logic Matters 20).
In summary, these chapters argue 1) that the core of Aristotle’s philosophy is his
metaphysics, more particularly his theory of substance; 2) that Aquinas was wide-ranging,
prudent and insightful, especially with regard to the nature of causation and cognition, with again
metaphysics being the key to understanding his ideas; and 3) that Frege’s theory of functions
serves to illuminate both semantics and Aquinas’s account of essence and existence. The last
point is not presented in the Frege chapter but in the Aquinas one, while the Aristotle chapter
refers us to that on Aquinas for a development of the idea proposed in the De Anima that
cognition involves receiving the form of the object into the cognitive faculty as a determining
structure: what in the thing was a substantial or accidental nature is in the sense or in the intellect
a perceptual or conceptual structure.
While there is some acknowledgement of the presence of other chapters but there is no
special effort to relate them. Here the two authors were pursuing their individual enthusiasms
and it is clear from later writings that in general either tact was exercised in not taking exception
to points made by the other, or else it was only on later reflection that differences came to be
18 Reprinted in From Parmenides to Wittgenstein. The Collected Philosophical Papers of G.E.M.
Anscombe, vol. I (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981) 57-65.
19 God and the Soul, 42-64.
20 Peter Geach, Logic Matters (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972).
13
acknowledged. One example may be mentioned which is also relevant to points made below.
The theory of thought as sharing the same form (in esse intentionale) as its worldly correlate (in
esse naturale) is expounded approvingly by Geach in “Form and Existence” and later defended
in the course of replying to an essay by Anthony Kenny.21 Anscombe, however, in a paper which
does not refer to Geach entitled “Thought and the Existence of Objects” (of unknown date and
only recently published) claimed to be able to make little of this idea, 22 and elsewhere, as will be
seen, she seems close to actual criticism.
In that connection it should also be noted that she was a more spontaneous, less
systematic and less literary writer than he. Both were highly creative, introducing a number of
important ideas into contemporary philosophy several of which are referred to by the expressions
they gave them such as, in Anscombe’s case ‘brute fact’, ‘consequentialism’, ‘non-observational
knowledge’, and ‘under a description’, and in Geach’s ‘Cambridge change’, ‘intentional
identity’, ‘personal vs impersonal reference’, and ‘relative identity’. But whereas Geach’s work
appears well-composed and well-stocked with philosophical, theological, historical and literary
references, Anscombe’s writings usually give the sense of starting afresh each time in response
to some newly discovered, or freshly returned to puzzle, not writing to a plan but setting down
the movement of thought and only occasionally referring to contemporary philosophers, even
more rarely quoting particular texts. These differences contribute to the common experience of
his work as being a delight to read and of hers as inducing the sense of being dragged through a
21 See Anthony Kenny “Form, Existence and Essence” and Peter Geach reply in Peter Geach:
Philosophical Encounters, 65-75 and 256-7.
22 “Thought and the Existence of Objects” in Mary Geach and Luke Gormally eds. Logic, Truth
and Meaning, Writings by G.E.M. Anscombe (Exter: ImprintAcademic, 2015) 198-205.
14
dense forest by a powerful solitary animal as it simultaneously evades predators and pursues
prey. In the passage from his “Philosophical Autobiography” that heads this essay Geach writes:
“we think about different though overlapping topics, and in a noticeably different style”. I have
said what part of that difference consists in, but there is something else, I suggest, that explains
this: Geach had the thinking and writing manner of a literary don even when he was young;
Anscombe had those of a spirited student even when she was old. His prose style is continuous
with that of Bunyan, Johnson and Chesterton while hers is often Socratic, sometimes colloquial,
and occasionally inclines to the satirical modes of Juvenal and Swift. It is tempting to add that
hers also reflects the vocabulary and style of Wittgenstein as it appears in the Philosophical
Investigations, but while her thought and mode of expression certainly were influenced by
Wittgenstein it also has to be taken account of that the translation is by Anscombe and no doubt
something of her style influenced that of the published text.
Before proceeding to the next section in which I consider what Anscombe and Geach
singly have to say on their own accounts about the nature of mind and soul I want to suggest that
these early books are very significant in revealing something of their approach to philosophy and
in shaping the concerns of their subsequent work.
First there is the obvious fact of them engaging with historical figures: Aristotle,
Aquinas, Descartes and Frege but in ways that bring them into relation with contemporary
philosophy, even though the latter is often not adverted to. Anscombe’s first three papers in
professional academic journal were “The Reality of the Past” (1950), “The Principle of
Individuation” (1953), and “Aristotle and Sea Battle” (1956); 23 Geach’s (other than
23 The first is reprinted in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind. The Collected Philosophical
Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe, vol. II (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981) 104-19, and the second and third
15
logical/semantic pieces) were “Form and Existence” (1955), “Good and Evil” (1956) and “The
Third Man Again” (1956) 24; Aristotle being drawn on directly in the first, second, third and
fifth, Aquinas in the fourth, and Plato in the sixth. This engagement with the past is certainly not
antiquarian, nor just an artifact of classical education. Rather Anscombe and Geach responded to
figures who appeared to them as great philosophers, rather than to contemporaries who seemed,
like themselves, gifted students and teachers of an academic discipline. Second, however, is the
fact that they were engaged by large issues: metaphysics, thought, language and reality, human
nature, and the debate between materialism and spiritualism (the latter in a non-occultist sense
that will be clearer shortly). It is to that last theme that I now turn.
III
Anscombe and Geach both made important contributions to philosophy of psychology:
she through Intention (1957)25 and subsequent writings on action and practical reasoning; he
through Mental Acts (1957) and a number of essays related to the theme of his third and
unpublished series of Stanton Lectures (entitled Freedom and Prediction).26 Neither, however,
in From Parmenides to Wittgenstein. The Collected Philosophical Papers of G.E.M.
Anscombe, vol. I (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981) 57-65 and 44-55, respectively.
24 “Good and Evil” Analysis 17 (1956): 33-42; “The Third Man Again”, Philosophical Review 65